Every route starts at one of your hubs. The opening fee scales with distance and with how busy the destination is — a slot into a major hub costs several times what a regional airport costs, before you have carried a single passenger.
You can open a route you cannot yet fly. Nothing stops you buying Helsinki to Singapore on day one; the game will simply refuse every departure until you own an aircraft with the range and the runway performance to make it. Opening routes ahead of your fleet is a legitimate strategy if you expect the fee to rise as you grow, and a waste of money if you are wrong.
A new route shows no demand at all. To see it you buy a survey, and the price scales with the size of your airline — information costs more when it is worth more to you.
This is the central economic decision in the game. You cannot compute demand yourself; the model and the data behind it live on the server and are not published. So every survey is a bet: you are paying to find out whether a route is worth flying, and sometimes the answer is no and the money is gone.
Some things you can reason about before paying:
None of that is precise enough to replace a survey, which is the point.
Prices are set per class and persist until you change them. Every route opens at its reference fare, and the forecast beside the sliders updates as you drag.
The forecast uses the same code the server runs when you dispatch, so it is not an estimate — it is the answer, given the aircraft, the survey and the current fuel price. The only thing that can change between forecast and outcome is the fuel market and how many other departures you run that day.
A practical method: set the aircraft you intend to use, then walk the economy slider from one end to the other and watch the result figure rather than the load factor. Peak profit is usually a little above the reference price on thin routes and a little below it on dense ones, but the shape depends on your cabin and your aircraft, so find it yourself.
Pick a ready aircraft based at the route's origin and dispatch. Three checks run on the server before the flight is accepted:
Then the outcome is computed and locked in. The flight takes real time — block hours based on the aircraft's cruise speed plus an allowance for taxi and climb — and pays out when it lands.
You do not need to be online when it lands. Everything that arrived while you were away is settled the next time you open the game, in one go. Closing the browser costs you nothing.
Fuel is deducted from your tanks at departure, so you must buy it in advance. Run dry and the departure is refused.
CO₂ quota works differently: if you do not hold enough, the flight still departs, but your reputation drops a point each time. Reputation feeds back into how full your aircraft fly, so it is a slow leak rather than a wall.
Prices for both move every 30 minutes. The spread is wide enough that timing your purchases matters and narrow enough that it cannot win the game for you.
Start your airline